A Haven for User Data

Last month my friend Suw twittered something that surprised me a little.

Obviously, I knew about Pownce and I remember reading about Twitter buying Values of N, so I get they shut down I Want Sandy.

I headed over to GetSatisfaction to look at IWantSandy’s product page. What a wash of anger and sadness. The closure topic has hundreds of replies and 95 faces and 17 faces most of which were Rael’s and he doesn’t really count. Rael has made an export available for I Want Sandy but it hasn’t been up there for too long. In fact, it closes today. Something that a lot of people objected to.

This isn’t totally dissimilar to the way we closed Yahoo Photos (not that I was involved in that project). I think it’s sad that something can close in the space of a month and after that period user data is lost. The idea occurred to me that while archive.org is great for public data it sucks ass for private data. The idea of the data haven was born.

Imagine this. You sign up for the newest shiniest start-up service. When you sign up you have the option to guarantee your data will be preserved by somedatahaven.org. If that service goes belly up they can pass your data and login credentials to somedatahaven.org who will allow you login and export your data. If an independent organisation can take on the role of guaranteeing the data availability of a number of services that you sign-up to then it’ll be a huge step forward for data portability. This would be especially true if the data could be syndicated as easily transformable open standards to be accepted by other services.

So, I want to build this service. However, I’m a busy man. I might build it anyway, because I’m an engineer with twitchy coding fingers, but I’d really like half a dozen or so people that would want to sign up to such a service so I can work with some real customers and support their needs while building. If you are interested email me.

So as I Want Sandy shuts down for good today, I hope we can create a better solution for the future.

Yahoo, the identity middle-man?

I had an interest thought about the direction of some of Yahoo’s projects. It seems like a lot of the stuff Yahoo is working on are about helping people to aggregate and manage their data. Two of the most obvious public examples are Fire Eagle and Open ID.

What I think is particularly interesting is that neither of these things are products or applications in themselves. Neither of them tries to control what you do with your data and in fact they will happily let you to use the information anywhere on the web that supports it.

I think Yahoo is actually creating an interesting market here. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say Yahoo is a brand perceived as safe and family friendly. By providing tools to let average people safeguard and manage important parts of their identity Yahoo is creating a new trend in middleware.

There has been some discussion recently about once you put something online how hard it is to manage thereafter. Conceptually Yahoo are positioning to help become your identity provider for the Web. Pick a brand you trust and let them act as a middleman between you and everyone else. Sites can put data in and sites can take data out but only if your middleman lets them.

Many people who support Open ID have stated an aim like this. Open ID allows SSO but it can also facilitate “attribute exchange”. This is where the Open ID provider passes the relying party¹ a number pieces of information (attributes) about the user logging in, assuming they say it’s ok. Right now Yahoo’s Open ID provider service allows users to pick a number of IDs they can use, from their Yahoo username, their Flickr username, to a random anonymous one. There is nothing that would stop Yahoo allowing you to associate a unique profile which each of these users. There is already a certain amount of evidence to show that the youth of today already do this kind of segmenting by hand and manage multiple online profiles.

I’d be interested in seeing what techniques can be applied to this information management. If you’ve ever seen the Facebook application TOS they are pretty harpdcore. You are allowed to store virtually nothing about the user in your own database. This is because Facebook are aware of the simple truth that once you share information you can’t unshare it. Look at the music industry, the properties of bits are not the same as those of physical objects. As such the only real protection you can offer the user is legal.

That said, obviously most people are happy to share information with many sites they use and let them store it. I’d like to see a much better way to represent the TOS so that a user could effectively review it before they share information. This a topic I discussed, yet again, at Leeds Barcamp. I want to see terms of service use a number of creative commons style attributes. Any additional terms they required would then be easy to identify and read. If you were using Open ID to sign in, it would be easy to define what you were happy to accept from a site and what you weren’t. Your Open ID provider could then easily flag any discrepancies to you before you login/signup.

Despite all of this I am not suggesting to say that Yahoo should own this potential market. However I think they are being extremely progressive in it. I’d love to see providers competing for consumer’s love. And, of course, since it’s all about being Open it’s not like anyone would stop you swapping providers. Not at least if they were sensible. I read a quote by a Sun exec (that I can’t seem to find) about making it easy for customers to leave, because they are much more likely to stay if they come back.

¹The site that lets you login with Open ID

What should a collaboration space be?

I went to last night’s Geekdinner with Moo, which was pretty interesting. My friend Mitch and his wife were there. I was enthusing about my recent thinking about startup environments especially after reading Paul Graham’s short essay on Cities.

Mitch is a great person to bounce stuff off, especially if it has some relevance to innovation. We had some great brainstorming about what is useful or necessary for a vibrant startup community. We really like the idea of collaboration spaces, and there are a number of places where you can rent a desk. What I dislike about such place is it’s still office space rental, even on a micro-economic scale. It’s good that freelancers can get out of their houses because you can go a little mad never seeing anyone during the day.

Mitch was telling me about his club the Institute of Directors which provides some desk space for its members. He pays a yearly fee to be a member and one of the perks is the space in central London to work from. I really like this idea, almost treating a collaboration space like a gym. It would be easy enough to have an online status of the amount of empty desks available at every location.

This idea in itself is pretty cool, but I still don’t think it’s enough to begin to provide that environment for collaboration where startups are citizen number one. As cliché as it is I still think that a cyber café is essential. Not everyone can base themselves in temporary desk space, and startups need to meet corporate shills (like me) as much as we need to meet them. Startups can learn a lot from the deep technology understand a lot of people working in corporations have, in return startups often have a firmer grasp of innovation and cultural hygiene.

Now I am of course just gassing right now, I have no idea if this is a viable business, but I think it certainly is something government should look at funding. The more collaboration space that encourage new and existing business to talk to each other the more vibrant our communities will become.

Technorati Tags:
collaboration, startups, innovation, polywonk, mitch sava, collaboration space, cyber cafe, government

What is a startup environment?

Yahoo have their London office on South East tip of Soho. Sometimes I like to get a coffee in one of the better Soho coffee shops. While I can’t complain about the coffee (just the opposite actually) sometimes I’m a little disappointed about the lack of a startup hacker community that is available to me. It’s not like there is a shortage of internet companies in the area with Osmosoft, MSN, Tiscalli, and others in the area.

Is London just too big to have a community where I’m going to bump into other web geeks? People talk about the Valley and the Bay Area like it’s a Mecca for tech and web cultures, is that really true? While I know plenty of people I can arrange to have coffee with, and often do, I just want more chance encounters.

So here is my line in the sand. I like the Milk Bar on Bateman Street in Soho. There isn’t free open wifi (yet) but there is a BT Openzone. It’s the sister site of Flat White so the coffee is awesome. Like Flat White it’s run by Aussies so the atmosphere is trendy and funky. London, especially Soho, geeks make this your coffee shop. Let’s have more random chance encounters because we choose to commune in a place we can make our community.

Update: Funny I should write this in the morning on the tube and then find this post with some thoughts about Cities by Paul Graham in the afternoon.

Technorati Tags:
startup, community, coffee, flat white, milk bar, bateman street, soho

The Geek affinity with Green

This week I’m going to two Green events, a networking party run by AMEE and GeeKyoto. Given that I am such a treehugging (carbon neutral), duck-squeezing (vegan), person I’ve been wondering what it is that makes some geeks care so much about green.

My simple conclusion is that geeks feel like they are empowered to make a difference. Hacker culture is pretty strong right now, where if something on your computer isn’t the way you want it, you fix it. Or, you can at least find someone else who did. The same is true of green, the long standing “justification” about why not to be green is that one person won’t make a difference. The debate here is not why economic theory doesn’t fit well into the human psyche, but rather that geeks don’t feel that way.

I’m proud to be a geek, I’m proud to be part of a sub-culture, a growing generation of hackers that change what they don’t like, I’m proud that one of the things I’m changing is how we learn to look after our planet.

Technorati Tags:
green, geek, hackers, geek culture, vegan, tree hugger, carbon neutral